How does Carolle Benitah and Claudia Ruiz Gustafson explore their past as a method of understanding identity?
“For most people, looking at a snapshot does not only make one sad for the time or person gone but can also trigger memories of the past, bringing them right back into the present in the mind of the viewer. Photographs, whether happy or sad, and especially family ones, work on both memory and remembrance – at the same time representing a memory and calling us to remember – and they hold a very special and important place in our lives.” (Bright and Van Erp 2019:37)
Through my personal investigation, I am going to focus on my mobile family life and how this lifestyle has effected me as an individual. I will explore how living in different countries has allowed me to gain cultural knowledge, new experiences and memories. It has ultimately shaped who I am and how I perceive the world. I will explore my mixed identity and the different cultures I have been exposed to by starting the narrative from the beginning. Creating collages and manipulating archival images will help me tell the story of how my mother and father met and fell in love in Peru. Since my father is a geography teacher, he takes the opportunity to go travelling whenever he can. Through applying to jobs in different countries, he ended up in Peru which is where he met my mother Isabel. I want to present their love story and display the events that followed after their marriage.
I will be investigating the two visual artists Carolle Benitah and Claudia Ruiz Gustafson who explore family, memory, displacement and identity from their own point of view. Through the use of vintage family photographs and the use of different mediums, these artists uncover family stories and create complex, multidimensional narratives to reflect upon what they have left behind while shifting countries and at the same time honouring and remembering family traditions. I have chosen to investigate Carolle Benitah because of the visual aspects portrayed in her work. For my own personal investigation, I would also like to manipulate and physically edit my archival imagery through artistic techniques, whether that may be sewing, drawing or cutting. She demonstrates her feelings towards her childhood from her current perspective, which is what I intend to do in my own project. Claudia Ruiz Gustafson is my second reference since her autobiographical, self reflective series Historias Fragmentadas has inspired me to make my own digital compositions. Like Gustafson, I want to use archival images and documents to explore my past and cultural identity. To respond to her work, I will be juxtaposing, tearing and layering family photographs in order to tell a personal story.
Before I begin addressing my work or the chosen photographers, I think it’s important to recognise the photographic history that influenced both projects I am analysing within this investigation. Having looked into a variety of artistic/photographic movements, I was interested by Dadaism and the way in which it linked into my personal study. Dadaism or Dada was a form of artistic anarchy born out of disgust for the social, political and cultural values of the time. It embraced elements of art, music, poetry, theatre, dance and politics. Dada was not a style of art like Cubism or Fauvism; Instead it was more a protest movement with an anti-establishment platform. There was a clear motive behind this movement. However, it is not the social, political and cultural issues behind the artworks that I am interested in. Although I admire the intentions of Dadaism, I am more intrigued by the visual aspects within the movement.
Dada began in Zürich, Switzerland and arose as a reaction to World War I and the nationalism that many thought had led to the war. The results of Dadaism were extremely diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, paintings and collage. Dada’s aesthetic, obvious by its mockery of materialistic and nationalistic attitudes, was a powerful influence on artists in many cities, including Berlin, Hanover, Paris, New York and Cologne, all of which generated their own groups. The movement dissipated with the creation of Surrealism, but the ideas it gave rise have become the foundations of various categories of modern and contemporary art.
Artist: Hannah Höch
In Berlin, one of the most popular mediums among the Dadaists was photography. Using scissors and glue, they made photomontage, with photographic images taken from the press. The realism of these images helped transmit the dreadful scenery of combat and death accurately and effectively. Photoshop is an example of how photomontage has developed into an advanced practice. With this software we can create photo-montages by layering and merging images together in order to create a new result.
I believe that Dadaism links to the photographic work that I have produced for my personal project. The photographers involved in the Dada movement would create collages of separate photographs that is re-photographed so that the final image is converted back into a seamless photographic print. I have carried out a similar approach by layering archival images of my own family photographs into one digital collage. Although my work does not address social, political and cultural issues like the Dada movement, I am creating collages in order to explore the past as well as my own cultural identity.
Carolle Benitah’s series Photo Souvenirs explores the memories of her Moroccan childhood by reworking and threading old family snapshots. She uses beads, coloured thread and scissors in order to alter her family photo albums to explore her memories during childhood as a way to understand her current identity. Benitah became interested in her family pictures when she looked through a family album and found herself “overwhelmed by an emotion”. She explains that the photographs represented “me, spoke about me and my family, told things about my identity, my place in the world, my family history and its secrets, the fears that constructed me, and many other things that contributed to who I am today”.
The artist says that she “excavated” images in which she appears from family albums and chose snapshots that relate to memories and loss. Benitah carried out a process of order, classification, scanning and then printing. She never manipulates the original photo. Once the images are chosen, she starts to tell her version of the story. Benitah explains that “The past of a human being, is neither permanent or finished, but reconstructed in the present time”. I find it interesting how Benitah doesn’t do anything directly on the original image. If you manipulate the original, then it would be changed forever. However, there is some sort of dedication that comes when adjusting the original since you are essentially rewriting your past and making a statement.
For the last step she adds needlework. Embroidering is principally a feminine activity. Waiting was associated to this activity: women embroidered, hoping for the man to return home. Embroidery is strongly linked to the environment in which she grew up in. Girls in a good family used to learn how to sew and embroider which were essential activities for “perfect women”. She uses embroidery with a purpose, a decorative function to re-interpret her own history and expose its failings. “With each stitch I make a hole with a needle. Each hole is putting a death of my demons. It’s like an exorcism. I make holes in paper until I am not hurting any more.”
I selected Benitah due to the visual aspects portrayed in her work. For my own personal investigation, I would like to manipulate and physically edit my archival imagery through artistic techniques, whether that may be sewing, drawing or cutting. Her series Photo Souvenirs captivated my interest since her artistic manipulations can be interpreted in different ways since they are not direct and obvious in their message. Therefore, the viewers must analyse the illustrations and come up with their own reasoning as to why Benitah chose to create these marks as a form of self reflection. This means that Benitah’s personal story remains personal since only she knows her true intentions behind each work. In order to explore her cultural identity and reflect on childhood memories, Benitah displays her current feelings based on the snapshots captured through artistic alterations which is what I intended to do with my project as well.
Les Cafards (The cockroaches)
This piece is an example of Carolle Benitah exploring her past as a method of understanding identity. The photograph above has been scanned and then manipulated using embroidery. By manipulating the photograph, she is returning to an old memory and imprinting current thoughts and messages within the past. This archival family photograph has most likely been captured by a family member whilst she lived in Morocco. Carolle Benitah has embroidered red thread where both children have linked hands together. This area is the main visual element of the image since it is the only colour feature in the entire frame. As viewers, we know they are related because of the red string bounding their hands together. Their connection cannot be broken. Like all the collages within the series Photo Souvenirs, Benitah uses red thread with a purpose. It leads Benitah to her past history. This vibrant yet deviant of all colours showcases its spectrums between love and hate, pain and joy, life and death. The children are surrounded by embroidered cockroaches which invade the space but they have angel’s wings and the fraternal links protect her and saves her. Like I have mentioned before, what I’m most fascinated about this collage in particular is how the visual alterations within the work are completely up to the viewer’s interpretation. It doesn’t really make any sense to the viewers since the concept is not personal to us but is for the artist. She has simply illustrated her ideas and how she views the moment that has been captured.
Originally from Lima, Perú, Claudia Ruiz Gustafson is a fine art photographer based in Massachusetts. Her work is mainly autobiographical and self reflective. Claudia Ruiz Gustafson grew up in a conservative middle class family in Perú and moved to the US when she was in her twenties. As time passed and the last of her grandparents died, Claudia felt compelled to bring attention to what she had left behind, being the only person in her family who left her country of origin “For me the hardest part was not to be able to spend the last years of my grandparents’ lives with them. My grandmother was the pillar of my family, the story teller and the story keeper of our family’s history. I knew she wanted me to continue this tradition”. This series helped Claudia to look deeper into her past by exploring memories and the emotion of loss.
In her series, Historias fragmentadas (Fragmented stories), she creates digital compositions from images of the past. By tearing, juxtaposing elements from the past and the present, layering archival documents, fragments from her journals and objects from her childhood, she has shed light on a personal story within an ancestral story that spans generations. Continuing her exploration to recall what she has lost, Claudia uses staged imagery, mostly self portraits, to transport her physical presence into the spiritual past as seen in the compositions. This series exposes the vulnerability of childhood, a longing for a time gone by and the truths of a particular Latin American Family.
I have chosen Claudia Ruiz Gustafson as my second reference for my personal investigation because her self reflective series Historias Fragmentadas has inspired me to make my own digital compositions through Photoshop. I intend to use archival images depicting my family in order to look into the past and explore memories. Like Claudia, I will explore my cultural identity by juxtaposing, tearing and layering archival images and documents in order to tell a personal story. In order to continue the exploration of my cultural identity, I have created photo-montages which merges self portraits with archival images to exhibit how living in different countries has shaped me as an individual.
Llena eres de gracia (Full of Grace)
This digital collage displays layers of different archival material combined together into one seamless photographic print. She often employs family snapshots in collages that are layered with textures and fabrics to reveal a longing for childhood and a person or place left behind. It is clear from my research on the photographer, that the purpose for creating this collage was to bring attention to someone she had left behind who presumably died when she moved to the US. Her layered compositions in the Historias Fragmentadasseries offer at times a playful sense of memory and in others a mournful sense of loss and longing. In this case, she has created the collage as a remembrance to one of her family members. This photograph is from Claudia’s family archive that she has inherited from a relative. The portrait in the middle of the composition depicts a middle aged woman in glam. It is a head shot in back and white film of a relative of Claudia whether that may be her mother or grandmother. The Portrait image is torn precisely in half, signifying that her mother/grandmother has passed away. The colour red makes an appearance. It seems to be some sort of fabric which runs down the middle of the frame. This probably signifies that although the individual has died, the family blood line still remains. In the middle of the torn portrait, there is a fragment of paper, perhaps from her childhood journal or a letter she has received from the individual in the image. This acts as a momento and reminds Claudia of her place of origin since the writing on the lined paper is in Spanish which is the official language in Peru.
The research on both these photographers has influenced my personal project, which focuses on my mobile family life and how this lifestyle has effected me as an individual. To investigate my cultural identity, I created collages by sewing and layering archival images which are aspects inspired by both artists. I will be looking at some of the different methods I used and visuals I created and what they represent. The first image features two archival photographs combined together into one digital collage. Both images were taken in Austria, a country I used to live in during my younger years. The top image within the collage, depicts me and my mother embracing each other which demonstrates our strong connection as mother and daughter. I only made alterations to the image below which depicts me as a child surrounded by deer sculptures. I have replicated Benitah’s series Photo Souvenirs by reworking old family snapshots with a red graphic ink pen. I created red illustrations on top of the image as a metaphor for leaving my traces behind in each country. To incorporate an element of Claudia’s work, I scanned a cloth originating from Vienna to act as the border. The second digital collage tells the story of when my father moved to Peru. Since my father is a geography teacher, he takes the opportunity to go travelling whenever he can. Through applying to jobs in different countries, he ended up in Peru which is where he met my mother Isabel. The two images within the collage showcase the culture in Peru and the different locations he visited once he arrived. The photograph below depicts my father visiting Machu Picchu for the first time, an iconic landmark in Peru. On the right side is a piece of Peruvian fabric I decided to incorporated into my digital collage. Creating photo-montages has helped me explore my mixed identity and the different cultures I have been exposed to during childhood. I have manipulated my archival imagery through artistic techniques, whether that may be sewing or drawing. It is a form of self reflection to explore how living in different countries has allowed me to gain cultural knowledge, new experiences and memories.
Both Carolle Benitah and Claudia Ruiz Gustafson explore the memories of their childhood by reworking old family snapshots. They both grew up in their country of origin and shifted when they started their photography career. Carolle Benitah lived in Morocco during her childhood but then made the decision to move to France, whereas Claudia Ruiz Gustafson moved from Peru over to the US in her twenties. Both Photo Souvenirs and Historias Fragmentadas are autobiographical and self reflective since they use their current perspective based on their childhood in order to alter the archival images artistically. Benitah uses beads, thread and scissors in order to change her family photos, whereas Claudia tears, juxtaposes elements from the past and present, layers archival documents and images from her childhood. Benitah and Claudia have similar intentions for their projects since they both explore their past in order to understand their identity. Benitah created the series Photo Souvenirssince her archival photographs evoked strong emotions as she looked through her family albums. She uses the photographs to explore herself, her family, her identity, her place in the world and many other things that contributes to who she is today. On the other hand, Claudia uses her archival imagery in order to bring attention to what she left behind in her country of origin. Moreover, the colour red has great significance in both their work although used with different purposes. Carolle Benitah uses red thread because it leads her to her past history. The vibrant yet deviant of all colours showcases its spectrums between love and hate, pain and joy, life and death. Claudia Ruiz Gustafson uses the colour red within her digital compositions because it represents the blood line among family members. Although both photographers create collages, they craft them using different methods and techniques. Claudia produces collages digitally by scanning each image separately and then layering them together using Photoshop, whereas Carolle makes artistic alterations on the image physically and afterwards scans the result in order to have a final seamless photographic print. Unlike Benitah, Claudia continues her investigation based on her cultural identity by using self portraits and staged imagery in order to transport her physical presence into the spiritual past.
In summary, I can conclude that photography as a medium can be used to explore memory, displacement and identity as demonstrated by the work of Benitah and Gustafson. It was insightful to investigate the way in which individuals illustrate their current perspective within their art through different methods and mediums. Attempting to convey a personal story and feelings through a traditional photograph is problematic because it is difficult to connect the viewer with the artists work especially if they don’t know their intentions or the symbolism behind certain aspects. In response to this dilemma, artists such as Benitah and Gustafson have drawn inspiration from the Dada movement by physically manipulating images and creating collages. I have learned about photographys potential and the way in which time frames can be altered and depicted through images. The work from these two photographers are heavily reliant upon the past and archival childhood images. Both artists inspired my work throughout my personal investigation and I am satisfied with my final outcomes since I have fulfilled my desire to experiment with as many materials and methods as possible, both traditional and digital. Every collage and image that I have used within my study has helped me tell the story of my mobile family life and how this lifestyle has effected me as an individual. Ultimately, I wanted to explore my mixed identity and how being exposed to different cultures through childhood has shaped me as an individual.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
https://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/art_movements/dadaism.htm
www.widewalls.ch › dada-collage-readymade
https://www.theartstory.org/movement/dada/